The Newspaper Comic Strip in the Making of American Mass Culture, 1900-1935

In the first third of the twentieth century, the newspaper comic strip took America by storm. Within a decade of the first single panel ‘funny’ appearing in 1896, comics had become a firm feature in American newspapers. Comics quickly spread across the United States, meaning Americans from vastly different walks of life could consume the same narratives simultaneously. This rapid spread was aided by the explosion of syndication in the 1910s, and the comics acquired enormous cultural salience. Comic artists –whose portrayal of mainstream life was driven in part by the demands of the syndicates to maximise their market –increasingly aimed to appeal to Americans from a wide range of social backgrounds and wished to avoid alienating readers by covering any topics that could be deemed offensive. As a result, they inadvertently created a normative depiction of American society centred around extremely narrow cultural conceptions of a white middle class, which excluded Black Americans and shored up a racialized hierarchy. Instead of engaging with Progressive political discourse the comics sought to smooth over difficult racial issues by ignoring and excluding them.

This thesis explores the evolution and impact of newspaper comic strips on American popular culture, arguing that they played a critical role in the wider consolidation of American mass culture in this period, despite being largely overlooked by historians. It uses extensive archival resources to detail the early development of the comics industry, and the dynamics of the syndicates. It then goes on to analyse the narratives of a dozen comics over a 35-year period (over 26,000 individual strips) in order to uncover the complicated and often profoundly satirical way that the comics dealt with issues around race, gender and particularly class and social status. Lastly, it explores the impact of the comics on American culture, including other forms of popular culture, advertising and consumer goods and language and dialect.